Artist Biography
Ruby Swinney (b. 1992) is a South African painter known for her luminous monochromatic works on translucent surfaces such as silk and tracing paper. Working from found and personal photographs, she employs a reductive painterly approach that allows light itself to become both medium and subject. Her paintings often conjure a parallel, dreamlike realm – ghostly figures adrift in landscapes that resist geographical placement. These immersive visions of the natural world meditate on the fragility of human existence, evoking both the uncertainties of our present and a longing for a changing environment that is growing darker and more estranged. By rendering nature as an uncanny dreamscape, Swinney invites viewers to reflect on our increasing alienation from the natural world and the dangers of separating a constructed “human sphere” from the vast unpredictability of “the natural.”
At the heart of her practice lie themes of loss and hope. Influenced by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Rebecca Solnit, she understands hope as a vital force in times of uncertainty. Her schooling at a Waldorf institution also exposed her to Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of Anthroposophy, whose ideas of spirituality and symbolism continue to shape her work. Through subtle iconography—haloes, altarpiece-like compositions, radiant light—she renders the everyday uncanny, infusing her subjects with both reverence and unease. Swinney’s paintings often depict idyllic moments of people in communion with nature: families at picnics, children at play, holidaymakers in gardens or greenhouses. These fleeting images of suspended fear and unconscious joy are quietly destabilized. Faces dissolve, foliage overwhelms, architecture looms in the distance. Her vivid, single-hue palettes amplify the emotional intensity, leaving an undercurrent of foreboding, as though these scenes belong to a past—or even a present—on the cusp of change.
Swinney’s sensitivity to displacement and liminality also shapes her work. As a second-generation British South African, she carries a personal sense of being an “alien” within her country of birth, marked by the lingering spectre of colonial history. This in-between identity feeds directly into her paintings, where echoes of absence, estrangement, and history permeate each surface. Her figures often appear as apparitions, suspended in time, inhabiting landscapes that feel both familiar and foreign, positioning the viewer as both spectator and witness.
Since graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 2015, Swinney has held seven solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows locally and internationally. Her first two solos with WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery—Ignis Fatuus (2017) and Hold Still (2019)—were followed by Human Nature (2018), her debut museum exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), Cape Town. She presented her first international solo with AKINCI Gallery, Amsterdam, in 2021 (The Distance Between Us), followed by Floating World (2022) and Amid the Alien Corn (2024). In March 2024, she relocated to London, where she now lives and works.
Install image of Floating World, AKINCI Gallery, Amsterdam. 2022.